This is the true story of a humpback whale named "Inland," and the people who came to know her during the autumn she spent close to shore in Salem, Massachusetts. The book is set in Salem Harbor, where local resident Kerry Griffin was stunned one morning when a twenty-eight foot long humpback whale surfaced right beside his dinghy as he was hauling up lobster traps. Griffin told Salem's harbormaster and others. Soon, news of the whale spread by word of mouth and through the Boston media. Hundreds of people came to watch the whale spout and breach, sometimes just fifty feet from shore. Mason Weinrich, chief scientist at The Whale Center of New England in Gloucester came to observe the whale, and named her "Inland" because she stayed close to land and her fluke markings looked like the letters I and L. After thrilling crowds in Salem for several weeks, Inland swam out to sea in late December, 2000. Researchers soon lost track of her as she migrated south for the winter. In April 2001, researchers in Massachusetts learned that Inland died after getting tangled in fishing gear off of the Virginia coast. The Whale Center of New England created a silver lining from the dark cloud of Inland's death by recovering her skeleton and hiring Maine scientist Dan DenDanto to undertake the process of reassembling it at the Center's headquarters. There, it now serves as an effective tool - telling Inland's story and teaching visitors about humpbacks, the threats they face, and how to help. Author Lisa Capone, a Boston Globe correspondent covering the North Shore of Massachusetts at the time of Inland's visit to the region, interweaves narrative and dialogue with facts about humpbacks, conservation concerns, and the fascinating but little-known process of "rearticulating" a whale skeleton.
